Eight police officers serving with Scotland's largest force listed their official religion as Jedi in voluntary diversity forms, it has emerged.

Strathclyde Police said the officers and two of its civilian staff claimed to follow the faith, which features in the Star Wars movies.

The details were obtained in a Freedom of Information request by Jane's Police Review.Strathclyde was the only force in the UK to admit it had Jedi officers.

In the Star Wars films, Jedi Knights such as Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda use the Force to battle the evil Darth Vader, who has strayed to the dark side.

Jane's Police Review editor Chris Herbert, who requested the information, said: "The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde Police with their Jedi police officers and staff.

"Far from living a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, some members of the noble Jedi order have now chosen Glasgow and its surrounding streets as their home."

Provided voluntarily

A spokeswoman for Strathclyde Police confirmed: "At the time of the request, 10 (eight police officers and two police staff) had recorded their religion as Jedi."She added that the force monitored "six strands of diversity" - age, disability, gender, race religion and belief, and sexual orientation.

The force said the information was provided voluntarily and securely stored.About 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. In Scotland the figure was a reported 14,000.

The Office for National Statistics did not recognise it as a separate category, and incorporated followers of Jedi with the atheists.

Last year, brothers Barney and Daniel Jones founded the UK Church of the Jedi - which offered sermons on the Force, light sabre training, and meditation techniques.Strathclyde Police employs 8,200 police officers and 2,800 civilian staff.

Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs Senior police officers have been warned to look out for a new knife which can inject a ball of compressed gas into its victim that instantly freezes internal organs. The 'wasp knife', which can deliver a ball of compressed gas capable of killing its victim at the press of a button, may be heading for BritaiMore..n, the Metropolitan Police fear.

A needle in the tip of the blade shoots out the frozen ball of gas which instantly balloons to the size of a basketball, freezing organs.

The Metropolitan Police have told colleagues in the West Midlands to be on the lookout for the blade, which is designed to kill sharks and bears.

Police are concerned that the £200 weapon could fall into the wrong hands.

The American-made weapon is sold to hunters and divers and injects the frozen gas when the small handle-mounted trigger is pressed.

The manufacturer describes it as perfect for downed pilots, soldiers and security guards and boasts that it will "drop many of the world's largest land predators".

It can snap-freeze all tissue and organs in the area surrounding the blast.

A source close to West Midlands Police said: "The Met is obviously concerned about this and that is why they have circulated the information.

"This knife will almost certainly kill and the Met must have intelligence that they are in circulation.

"I think it is only a matter of time before one of these is used because the internet makes it much easier to find and buy weapons like this."

Labour MP for Perry Barr in Birmingham, Khalid Mahmood, said: "Weapons like this are absolutely disgraceful and there is no reason at all why people should be walking around the streets with them.

"There should be high-profile operations and high-profile arrests against anybody caught with them. The way to tackle the wider issue of knife crime is with effective community policing, which the West Midlands force does very well.

"The Met could pick up on the lessons from West Midlands Police in its excellent community work in places like Handsworth, Aston and Lozells."

The Wasp injection website states: "The effects of the compressed gas not only cause overinflation during ascent when used underwater, but also freezes all tissues and organs surrounding the point of injection on land or at sea."

Two Burmese fishermen have survived almost a month in shark-infested waters in an ice box after their ship sank.

The men, both aged in their 20s, had been on a 12m Thai wooden fishing boat with 18 others when it sank in heavy seas off Australia's north coast on December 23.

Australian Maritime Safety Authority spokeswoman Tracey Jiggins said: "They had no safety equipment, no beacMore..ons, no means of communication and they'd been drifting for 25 days.

"For them to have even been spotted in a huge body of water is amazing."

The men were spotted by an Australian coastal patrol aircraft on Saturday and were winched onto a rescue helicopter and taken to hospital on Thursday Island, off Australia's northern coast.

"They were desperately keen to get on. When they got up they skolled (drank) 2 litres of water each, within seconds," helicopter pilot Terry Gadenne said.

A photograph taken by Customs aircraft showed the pair standing in a high, red-sided ice box used by commercial fishing boats and desperately waving at rescuers.

Hospital officials said the pair were hungry and dehydrated after surviving cyclonic storms in the region, but were recovering well and would be released soon.

The pair would then be questioned by immigration officials and police, who had not yet determined how the pair survived and what they did for food and water.

Ms Jiggins said the others on board the boat would certainly have perished and no search for other survivors was planned.

It was also unclear where the Thai-based fishing boat, crewed by Thais and a handful of Burmese, sank and how far the pair had drifted before they were picked up 60 nautical miles northwest of Horn Island.

Australia has one of the longest coastlines in the world and the country's search-and-rescue patrol zone covers a tenth of the world's surface, or 20 million square miles of the Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans.

The Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, is infested by sharks and the area is regularly fished by both licensed and illegal fishing vessels, many from Asia.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Women may one day be able to delay the menopause, after a study showing that it is possible to prolong the working life of ovaries by transplanting female stem cells that develop into mature eggs.

The findings also raise the prospect of treating some female infertility where the ovaries do not produce eggs. The hope is that one day stem cell transplants could replenish the fresh eggs in infertile women.

The accepted dogma in reproductive biology was that female mammals are born with a finite lifetime store of about two million egg-producing follicles. In humans, this number has fallen to about 400,000 by puberty, and at menopause too few eggs remain to permit fertility.

Four years ago United States scientists showed it was possible to obtain stem cells from the ovaries of adult women and grow them into mature egg cells.

Now scientists in China have shown that it is possible to isolate stem cells from immature and mature ovaries of mice, store the cells in the laboratory, and transplant them into sterile females to enable them to give birth to healthy offspring.

Research by Professor Ji Wu and colleagues at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, showed that it is possible to separate special cells in mice ovaries that seem to function as stem cells for the female germ-line cells in the eggs. These cells have the potential to divide indefinitely and can be stored for years.

The scientists isolated female germ-line stem cells of newborn mice and adult females. They cultured them for up to 15 months and six months respectively before transplanting into sterile mice, which gave birth to healthy offspring.

Professor Azim Surani, of the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge University, said the results have important implications for women who do not produce mature eggs. It might be possible, he said, to isolate these stem cells from a woman earlier in life so that she could have children later.

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About Me

Happily married with a wonderful wife and three bubbly children. We lead a simple but exciting lifestyle in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The kids enjoy world class education under a conducive enrolment, they have better chances in their future!